Between Repurposing and Innovation: Governing the Resilience of Critical Offshore Energy Infrastructures in Italy

Offshore energy infrastructures are becoming increasingly central to the low-carbon transition while raising pressing questions of resilience and security. Assets such as offshore wind installations, subsea electricity cables, and pipelines are exposed to a growing range of environmental, technological, and geopolitical risks, as well as cyber and physical threats. This article develops an analytical framework for the study of critical offshore energy infrastructure governance, combining two dimensions: modes of governance, ranging from public-led to private-led arrangements, and problem-framings, spanning threat-based and risk-based approaches. The framework is applied to the Italian case to trace recent institutional and policy developments in critical offshore energy infrastructure governance. Findings reveal an increasing securitisation of offshore energy infrastructures and a shift towards more public-led and threat-based approaches, alongside the consolidation of risk-based instruments focused on resilience and coordination with private operators. The article argues that these dynamics are shaped by path dependence: While the repurposing of existing institutional capacities enables rapid responses in an emerging policy field, it also contributes to fragmented governance arrangements and constrains the development of a more coherent framework. More broadly, the study highlights how competing governance modes and problem-framings shape critical infrastructure governance during the low-carbon transition.